the art form I love

Film The last time I posted anything which looked like a review with paragraphs about a new film release was for Inception in July 2010. For someone who has a post graduate merit in Screen Studies this could and should be regarded as embarrassing. But I've had plenty to keep me busy in the meantime and though my film watching rate hasn't diminished, my need to give an opinion has.

I had always planned to write something about exactly why, using phrases like "creative paralysis" and "original thought" but since it's not decision I've really taken on purpose and which is  index linked to my lack of being to an actual cinema (Of Gods and Men last Christmas I think), I didn't see the point.

But this excellent article by Charles Taylor, and specifically this paragraph probably crystallises my creative paralysis and how I fear my own lack of original thought:

"Part of the problem is the thing often cited to prove the strength of film criticism: the sheer number of people online who are doing it. But to use this as evidence of a new golden age is simply to play a new version of equating how good a movie is with its box-office receipts. There are too many critics writing too many pieces. And even the ones who have reacted against the shallowness of the current conversation, the ones who turn out long, detailed considerations of films have found a way to make themselves close to irrelevant. You can understand why a young critic would want to show off what he (and it’s almost always a “he”) knows. That’s part of a how a young critic gets noticed. But too many Web critics affect a donnish air ludicrously beyond their years. Whatever movies are for them—objects for analysis or gnostic contemplation—they don’t sound as if they’re any fun, and they don’t communicate to readers that movies, even difficult or unusual movies, can be a pleasure. A lot of the time they don’t communicate to readers at all."

  But I have to add that for all the new films I am watching thanks to LOVEFiLM, I'm only really enjoying about a third (you'll have to wait until the end of the year to discover which) and I'm not sure you'd be that interested in watching me become increasingly jaded about the art form I love.